UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering Blog

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

In its Global Data Cloud Index released Oct. 15, Cisco forecasts that global cloud traffic will grow 4.5-fold, a 35 percent combined annual growth rate, by 2017. Today’s data centers in which rows of servers sprawl over hundreds of thousands of square feet already consume some 30 billion watts of electricity, The New York Timesreported last year.

And this is all the more reason to rethink data center design and size so they require a lot less power and space, said two University of California, San Diego researchers in the Oct. 11 issue of the journal Science.

In their commentary, electrical engineer Yeshaiahu (Shaya) Fainman and computer scientist George Porter proposed replacing the racks and racks of servers in today’s data centers into a single chip. “These ‘rack-on-chips’ will be networked, internally and externally, with both optical circuit switching to support large flows of data and electronic packet switching to support high-priority data flows,” Fainman and Porter write.

Fainman is professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Porter is a research scientist in the Center for Networked Systems at UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Graduate student Qing Gu at work in the Fainman lab.

Their proposed solution will require several significant technology advances. The most significant are how to network all the individual processors on a single chip as well as how to network multiple rack-on-chips to each other, said Porter. “To handle Big Data processing and data-intensive applications, you've got to have an enormous amount of network bandwidth, and we're developing new technologies to deliver that bandwidth cheaper, with less power and heat, and in a smaller form-factor than existing approaches,” Porter said. Fainman’s lab has been developing several aspects of the dense integration of electronics and photonics and nanophotonic technology required to achieve this vision in collaboration with several other universities as part of the Center for Integrated Access Networks. Fainman’s lab last year built the smallest no-waste laser to date, a significant step needed to enable future computer chips with optical communications. Their breakthrough was reported in the journal Nature.

Motherboardreported on Fainman and Porter’s idea for “nanoservers” this week:

“But the meat and potatoes of Yeshaiahu Fainman and George Porter’s server-rack-on-a-chip vision is really about taking the existing framework for a server rack and recreating it at the nano-level. They say that miniaturizing all server components so that several servers can fit onto a computer chip would increase processing speed. Making circuit systems to support all these mini-components using advanced lithography is already feasible, but scientists have yet to realize nano-transceivers and circuit-switchers—the key components that transmit data. And while silicon chips are increasing being used to transmit data-carrying light waves in fiber optic networks, efficiently generating light on a silicon chip is still early in its development. The researchers offer some solutions, like including light generating nanolasers in the chip design.”

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

The International Conference
on Computer Design chose a paper coauthored by Dean Tullsen, a computer
scientist at the Jacobs School of Engineering, and George Cai, of Intel, as one
of the five mostly influential papers in the conference's 30-year history. "This
is the sort of stuff that puts CSE and UCSD on the map," Rajesh Gupta,
chair of computer science at the Jacobs School, wrote in an email announcing
the honor. The paper, "Power-Sensitive Multithreaded
Architecture," published in 2000, wasfirst to quantify the energy advantages of
multithreaded architectures, which can provide significant performance gains
with marginal increased power cost. It also presented architectural
optimizations which would enable a multithreaded architecture to achieve the
trifecta: lower power, higher performance, and lower energy than conventional
architectures.Paper
co-author and Jacobs School alum John Seng, now a professor at Cal Poly San
Luis Obispo, will present a retrospective on the paper during a special session
at the conference, which takes place from Sept. 30 to Oct. 3 in Montreal. Read
the abstract and full paper here.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Joshua Windmiller, a postdoctoral researcher working in the lab of UC San Diego nanoengineering Professor Joseph Wang, is working on a commercially viable printed biofuel cell that could derive power from urine, sewage and other wastewater sources. The technology is designed to meet a need for field-deployable and mobile power solutions particularly for recharging the electronic devices that soldiers carry with them into the battlefield such as night vision goggles, GPS systems, and two-way radios in order to prolong deployments. This technology could lighten the load of batteries soldiers must carry with them on missions into remote areas.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

We recently posted our Jacobs Legacy videos to the Jacobs School YouTube channel. This series of videos represents a video biography of Irwin M. Jacobs, prepared on the occasion of his 70th birthday (in 2003). More info here.